A Healed Promise
by PuddlesToGrowOn
Summary: Our hero's friendships were broken with the passing years, as the eight saviors went their own ways. This is a story of their (nearly) adult children, and how fate chances that they should come together....without knowing the real past....


**Disclaimer**: I'm pretty sure that you all must know this, but Fanfiction seems to stress the rule beyond what it needs to go. I don't own Squaresoft, and I don't own Final Fantasy IX. Arte is my character, as is Shade, and Rose, so far. No other characters belong to me, of course.

**Note: **Eighteen years after Zidane returns, and sixteen years from the day Zidane and Garnet are married, we join young Prince Aughus ReTien Esabin on the morning after his sixteenth birthday. It's a little slow…I'll admit it, but please, do not flame it. It's a cliffhanger, though. Just a warning to those cliffhanger-haters. (shrugs)

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My father told me many stories when I was younger than six years old. I was much too little to understand the real meaning of "death" or "pain" and much less "fear" than I could understand the numbers or words scrawled on my pendant. My mother told me that the gem I carried had more value than what a merchant could pay for it, yet she knew all along that it would only confuse me. In which case, she would then pat me on my head and promise me that I would understand when I was older. I learned to count within the year, and recorded the passing years in my journal, as if they were mere stone marbles rolling by my grasp. They slid away too easily, and I remained as oblivious to these outside horrors as I was when I first come into this world.

                Again, my father perplexed me with yet another enigma, by saying that he too came into the world, lost and confused. He told me that even though his emotions were similar , he was not born by a mother's womb. And I asked him who his mother was, curious as to whom my grandmother was, he laughed and did not reply. Numberless times passed in which the same question arose, and was never greeted with a foreign answer. My father laughed at me, and once told me to never mind the past. Forever, I was reminded that reaching for a goal behind your back was like trying to drink ale from the bottom of the mug. It simply was not done.

                I don't suppose I was spoiled, no matter what rumors said otherwise. The only real pleasure I took in my younger days was the feeling of suspense, ever night, when I would await my father's bedtime story. It seemed, until I outgrew these stories, that he never repeated himself. One tale after the other, and every one had some different ending, or a twist at the end. I began to learn about all sorts of things, like black mages, magic, airships, the extinct Iifa tree, and most importantly, a made-up world called Terra. I rather enjoyed the stories of Terra, and the haunting blue light. I loved stories, almost as much as I loved being what I was, and who I was….I loved them until the dreams stopped all joy in Terra. Terra was evil. Terra was sick….it brought me pain…

                They weren't dreams of anything I had experience before. I had felt pain, when my cat died, when I tripped and tumbled down the stone steps in front of my bedroom door…I accepted pain as everyone else did. A feeling inevitable in life….And then, that all changed, when I turned fourteen years old. It was exactly a year after I had stopped listening to my father's stories. I had thought my daydreaming and imaginative Terra at an end. My dreams, on my fourteenth birthday night, brought these images back like a whip on a spindle It was a single dream, on filled with light. The moment I passed into slumber, light shrouded every corner of my mind, and in every crevice of my consciousness. Between sleeping and waking, forever, there would be an instant, blinding rip of pain. I would awaken, crying, unable to cease the flow of tears caused by this unimaginable pain. I would never sleep after that. I became a living zombie, uncaring to my parent's urges, or the worry of my country's people. When I did sleep, the dream returned, and every time appeared with more ferocity than before. 

                It took a month for the pain to subside. The dreams began to come to me in a painless form…simply a faint, blue light welcoming me…enveloping me in an embrace that felt like….home. Never, not even once, did I explain the dreams to my father or mother. I did not tell a soul, in fear that they would laugh at me, and call me a child for being scared of a light. This certain dream still  haunted me, until the very night of my sixteenth birthday. Tonight, it did not come at all. I fell asleep, belly full of a feast's fraction, and my mind full of what I expected to come during the night. I welcomed it, however, as part of my life. It was enjoyable, and therefore, no longer a threat. I shouldered a new realization…one that gave me new pride in my name.

                I, Prince Aughus ReTien Esabin, was no longer a child.

                I was first aware of the morning when a single pair of cold, damp hands had seized my bare feet, followed with an all-too-familiar giggle. I already knew whom it was, and why they had did it, so I bothered little than to crack a single eye open and glare apprehensively into the face of my twelve-year-old sister, Ashel. No sooner had I closed that eyes, when the same, icy grasp repeated itself in a more noticing way.

                I bolted upright,  grasping my stunned nose in both hands. Angry, though amused at the same time, I threw off my covers and leapt out of bed. "Ashel, you've been practicing Blizzara again!" I accused, with a threatening tone.

                My sister, unlike most others, knew black magic.

                I was let with an empty room and the races of another giggle in the hall. I rushed to my bedroom door only to find that the brat had disappeared again. Why I didn't realize that I wouldn't ever catch the little, human dart, I would never come to understand. Instead of giving chase, I wearily returned to my bedside. I had barely glanced at the sun outside, when a cheerful voice interrupted my already-fuming thoughts.

                "Arte! Up and at 'em, boy! Hop to it, now! Out--" A broad, smiling face appeared in my doorway. Attached to the widening grin,  the one and only Rosemary Ondonuo, or, at my angle, my plump and kindhearted maid, Rose. I weakly returned her morning-happy smile, but refused to move from my spot. Rose, as always, took immediate notice of my regular crabbiness.

                "Ho, no now, Arty," she scolded, hitting me across the shoulder with the damp soap-towel she had, as usual, in her right hand. "None of this washy attitude! Not on my shift, not if I can help it!"

I barely flinched, being quite used to this behaviour. "," I said, between two yawns. "Coffe, maybe, but not teasing. No, definitely not teasing."

"I'll do something half worse if you dun get outta bed," Her eyes twinkled down at me. "Ye wouldn't want me to get fired my fourteenth year on the job, would ye?"

I didn't reply. Answering would have led to a lecture, and that lecture to my father's ears, in which he would just _have to _get a word or two of his own, 'equivalent" advice to be part of. Luckily, Rose knew when enough was enough, and did no more that morning then to straighten my curtains and check if my spotless dresser had accumulated a single breadth of dust overnight. When she was gone, I hastily threw on some clothes, prior to combing my hair and adjusting my collar. Then I was out, into the hallway, and ready to start my first day as a sixteen-year-old.

I'll put my feelings briefly. There are those parents who cannot bear to hide a single fact from their children, where lies were forbidden, and secrets were left out. I wished harder for parents such as these, more than I wished for anything else. I would have given up my status of the crown prince, to have a mother and father that would consistently tell me the truth. 

This was the first thought in my mind when I encountered my father that morning. Life was about to return to normal.

"….she'll get over it, Zidane. Right? Tell me you're not going to— I mean, um….you're not…actually going to…um, try and do that…you know, right? Not that…..I mean, it's a little risky and all…."

"Aw, geez….it was my _son's birthday, _Vivi! Tell me if you'd ever forget you're son's birthday, 

because some geezer tried to poison you during your sleep!"

                This was deifinitely time for me to intervene. I stepped around the corner, acting as if I had been walking the whole time. Nope, didn't hear nothing. They couldn't accuse me of anything.

                But what fun would there be in that?

                "Morning, Dad. Vivi," I nodded respectfully. I smirked at myself when my father turned a ghostly white, and the finely-dressed black mage blinked in false innocence. I cleared my throat. "Pardon me asking, but…do what? Someone tried to poison you in your sleep?"

                "Um-" Vivi, or as my father would put it, "good ol' Vivi", interrupted the king before he could so much as squeak in reply. "There's nothing to worry about. Miss Beatrix said that she would double the…um, the security on Zidane's room. 

                Absently, I nodded. "I'll take this as a reason as to why I didn't see you at all yesterday," I said, addressing my father. I was enjoying this….

                "Maybe," said my father, voice expressing both a sad apology, and a stern warning. "Things like that happen. Vivi seems to be the only one who's looking out for my well-being. At least I'm alive, and breathing,. Thanks for worrying, though, _son_."

                I grinned. "No problem."

                I knew that my mother would have boxed my father one, had she been present that moment. Vivi, my father had told me,  had been a brave soul since he was a kid himself. I could see the tattered, worried look in his face, which eliminated anything but sickness, however. Whatever acts of bravery the young black mage had shown as a child were long ago over. Vivi had become an instructor in the arts of black magic. Shade, his son, took up the family business.

                "Um, D-Dad….my staff?" The ten-year-old black mage stood just behind his father, holding the pieces of a broken staff. I smiled kindly at him. He smiled back, and adjusted his pointed hat, almost shyly.

                Vivi beamed at his son, "Be home by dinner, okay?"

                Apparently taking this as an invitation to leave at last, the little black mage nodded and brushed off his coat. He disappeared down the corridors, his broken weapon trailing him.

                I was slightly curious. "How did he manage to break it so soon?"

                Looking a little embarrassed, Vivi cast his eyes to the floor, "Um, he struck a Bandersnatch across the head too hard. I'm glad he pays for his own weapons….I don't think there would be much left to lvie on if I bought him a new staff every week."

                For the third time, it seemed, I nodded, "Oh."

                That was the last utterance form my mouth, before all chaos broke loose.


End file.
